British historian Richard Overy revisits the case for the World War II Allied air offensive in 'The Bombers and the Bombed'

Books about the World War II Allied aerial bombing offensive against the Axis inevitably center on two questions: its strategic efficacy and its morality.

Richard Overy’s penetrating new study, “The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940-1945” (Viking, 592 pp., $36), focuses more on the former than the latter, although those inclined to debate ethics will find plenty here to inform their judgments.

Overy, a British historian and World War II specialist, has authored numerous books on that conflict. Twenty years ago, in “Why the Allies Won,” he argued there was “something fundamentally implausible about the contention of bombing’s critics” that bombing was ineffective or counterproductive.

How could dropping millions of tons of explosives on factories and cities not seriously weaken the enemy? He concluded then that “the air offensive was one of the decisive elements in Allied victory.”

He recalibrates that assessment in “The Bombers and the Bombed,” which he advertises as “the first full narrative of the bombing war” over continental Europe. In coming to his more nuanced verdict, Overy examines how the British and Americans forged their bombing strategies, as well as the responses bombing “evoked from the communities subjected to it.”

Early on, Overy addresses “one of the most important paradoxes” of Anglo-American strategic bombing. Of all the World War II belligerents, only these two liberal democracies fully embraced the doctrine of achieving victory by destroying the enemy’s “vital center” from the air. They wound up killing “around one million people in Europe and Asia.”

He finds the answer to this incongruity in what scholars call “strategic culture.” Unlike the continental states, both Great Britain and the United States enjoyed the geographic blessing of separation from their enemies, relieving them of the need to rely on large land armies.

Pursuing victory through airpower also allowed them to leverage their wealth, scientific and technological advantages, and superior industrial capacity while minimizing their own casualties.

Nevertheless, the search for the enemy’s “vital center,” plus the operational limitations of aircraft, navigation and bomb aiming, along with enemy air defenses, led the British and Americans to adopt distinctly different approaches.

The Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command favored nighttime area bombardment of cities, seeking to wreck German industry by euphemistically “de-housing” workers and ruining morale. In an inversion of “collateral damage,” hitting factories was a side effect of “destroying working-class neighborhoods” and killing the inhabitants.

The U.S. Army Air Forces, on the other hand, preferred daylight “precision” attacks on targets such as oil production and transportation networks. Although acknowledging that accuracy claims were often overstated, Overy maintains that the Americans “had a surer strategic grasp and a clearer set of strategic objectives” than their British allies. He also credits the defeat of the German air force as a significant contribution to Allied victory and as “an American achievement.”

Overy avers that any account of the bombing war must take in “the view from below as well as the view from above.” While statistical evidence is ambiguous, he calculates that over 350,000 Germans were killed. Still, the Germans hung on.

Peak bombing and peak German industrial production coincided. Nazi authorities improvised economically and organized effective civil defenses. The German populace exhibited a “remarkable degree of social discipline.” Overy notes that bombing didn’t “drive a wedge between people and regime.” Rather, it increased their dependence on the state for protection and welfare.

In some of the book’s freshest pages, Overy explores the effect of Allied bombing outside Germany. Almost 30 percent of the total bomb tonnage dropped in Europe fell on Nazi-occupied territory, which in an Orwellian sense was “bombed into freedom.” Alluding to a persistent postwar controversy, Overy observes that the Allies bombed “everywhere but Auschwitz.”

Painstakingly researched and clearly written, this excellent book will interest both experts and readers seeking an introduction to its analytically and morally complex subject.

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